Biology 370 – Study Questions 2-1
1. How did Steve Franks and colleagues show that flowering time change in wild canola (Brassica
rapa) meet all the requirements for evolution by natural selection?
2. Why couldn’t Steve Franks and colleagues just establish that the 2004 plants flowered earlier in
the field than the plants did in 1997 and argue that it was caused by natural selection?
3. What is a “norm of reaction?”
4. What genes were shown by Hoekstra and colleagues to vary among different populations of the
oldfield mouse?
5. How do the genes that Hoekstra and colleagues studied result in variation in coat color?
6. How did Kaufman demonstrate the coat color has fitness consequences in the oldfield mouse?
7. Describe one organism (other than one used in class) that has 2 or more adaptations to its
environmental conditions.
8. How does the phylogeny of birds and the fossil record of the relatives of birds show that feathers
evolved before flight?
9. What is a “life history strategy?” What kind of traits comprise a life history?
10. What life history strategy differences did Reznick and colleagues demonstrate between upstream
and downstream populations of guppies?
11. What did Reznick and Endler hypothesize was the cause of differences in offspring size between
upstream and downstream populations of guppies?
12. How did Reznick and Endler demonstrate experimentally that a life history characteristic of
guppies changed in different environments?
13. How and why does schooling behavior differ between upstream and downstream populations of
guppies?
14. How did Lenski study long-term evolution in E.coli?
15. How did Lenski and colleagues demonstrate that E.coli in later generations were more fit than
their ancestors in earlier generations?
16. How might the adaptation of E.coli to different temperature environments be an example of
antagonistic pleiotropy?
17. What physical constraint explains why most cells are small?
18. Why do traits that strongly affect fitness usually have little genetic variation?
19. What does the statement “natural selection lacks foresight” mean? Use an example to explain this.
20. How does variation in eye morphology in mollusks illustrate the hypothetical stages in the
evolution of the complex camera eye of advanced cephalopods?
21. How are cranial sutures of vertebrates an exaptation?
22. What is “gene sharing?”
23. How can gene duplication create genes with new functions?
24. Describe the function or use of a hemoglobin polypeptide other that Hb-α or Hb-β.
25. How did gene duplication result in the evolution of an aldosterone receptor in tetrapods?